Flexible and stretchable electronics packages provide computing power in certain environments where flexibility and good shock-resistance is needed. Various sports applications, medical devices, nano-sensors, micro-electromechanical systems, and networking modules for the Internet-of-Things can benefit from microelectronics on flexible substrates. For example, wrist wraparound devices can be made thinner, lighter, and less noticeable when the onboard microelectronics can flex with the changing environment. Shape-compliant and shock-resistant microelectronics can be included in many items, such as vibrating appliances, motor parts, clothing, wearable fitness sensors, bandages, flexible medical devices, heart catheters, bottles, drinking cans, footballs, balloons, and so forth, that are traditionally off-limits to conventional electronics on rigid substrates.
Dielets and small chiplets work well with flexible substrates to bring the processing power of large microprocessors characteristic of CPUs to flexible microelectronics packages. An array of dielets enables a microprocessor to be “broken-up” into subsystems, located on many individual dielet pieces flexibly connected together, each dielet performing a function or containing a subsystem of the conventionally monolithic microprocessor. Each dielet may have a specific or proprietary function from a library of functions, enabling a collection of dielets to emulate the large monolithic chip. A dielet or chiplet can be a complete subsystem IP core (intellectual property core) possessing a reusable unit of logic, on a single die. A library of such dielets is available to provide routine or well-established IP-block functions. The numerous dielets for emulating many functions of a large monolithic processor can also be made very thin, making a processor or CPU that is distributed in dielets to be more physically compliant, thinner, lighter weight, and more shock-resistant than conventional devices.
Computer memory, on the other hand, such as random access memory (RAM), cannot be made too thin without degrading memory performance in proportion. At physical slices thinner than 50 microns, a loss-of-memory disadvantage begins to outweigh the thinness advantage. Thus, it can be difficult to achieve large amounts of memory on thin, compliant microelectronics packages, because the memory chips need to remain relatively thick.
Nonetheless, both significant computer memory and microprocessing elements could theoretically be implemented on thin, flexible substrates as distributed collections of dielets if the interconnections between the dielets could be made dense enough to provide high-capacity communication between the dielets. But the dielets are small, and so high-density communication between dielets has conventionally proven to be a challenge.